The Garden Harvest: Why Disney Put Experiences in Charge
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
FRESH CLIPPINGS
Content as the Top Funnel
By elevating Josh D’Amaro, the Head of Experiences, to the top job, Disney is making a clear business statement: the real, durable value is not in the content, but in what content unlocks.
That sounds familiar if you’ve been paying attention to creators.
In the creator economy, content isn’t the profit center. The biggest creators build audience through content, then capture value through products, live events, memberships, and IP extensions. Even MrBeast runs profit through commerce and experiences, not views.
Disney is doing the same thing at industrial scale.
Yes, movies and shows don’t account for the majority of profit on their own. But they remain the entry point into everything that does generate outsized value: theme parks, merchandise, live experiences, lifelong brand attachment.
This aligns with what Doug Shapiro has been arguing for a while. When one input into a value chain becomes cheap or abundant, value flows elsewhere. But that doesn’t make the input irrelevant. It makes it more strategically important.
The dangerous misread is the idea that this shift means content matters less.
That’s simply false. Strip away the films, characters, and stories, and you’re left with… an empty castle.
The TikTokification of Studios
A little more on last week’s story about how Paramount+ is making a significant push into short-form video and user-generated clips as pretty much every studio is thinking of attempting this.
Taking a step back, for years studios treated short-form as marketing. Clips lived outside the real product.
But that era is ending. Short-form is becoming the front door, not the billboard.
Discovery now happens inside the scroll. People don’t decide what to watch. They stumble into it.
Taylor Dempsey has a few predictions that we should all be conscious of:
1. Content will be designed for short-form moments from day one.
Not just trailers, but scenes meant to live on their own.
2. Platforms become taste engines, not libraries.
Less browsing thumbnails. More scrolling scenes until one earns your time.
3. Marketing and content merge.
The line between “the movie” and “the promo” collapses.
4. Success is measured by cultural surface area.
How often a story shows up in feeds, group chats, and remixes, not just opening weekend or total streams.
Bottom line: studios aren’t competing for streams or ticket sales. They’re competing inside the scroll. And if that’s where discovery now lives, the real challenge is learning how to make it great.
A New Type of Streamer / Creator Deal
In the past, we’ve highlighted several creator partnerships with legacy companies, but recently there was one that established a new kind of relationship.
You-Tuber and social media star Salish Matter and her dad are partnering with Netflix to develop their fan-favorite franchises across scripted, unscripted, and animated series, in which Salish will star. The deal also includes consumer products and experiential offerings.
What makes this one different is that there was no single pitch or pilot driving the deal. Netflix bet on the creators themselves, their audience, and their ability to develop ideas collaboratively over time.
That makes this far closer to an overall deal than a one-off project order.
It’s a clear signal that legacy platforms are moving away from buying finished projects and toward backing creators as long-term, scalable IP engines.
GARDEN VIEW
Quite the interesting conversation at the “New Hollywood Power Players: The Rise of Creators on TV” panel at CES in Las Vegas.
Takashi Najano (Samsung TV Plus), Rishita Patel (Crunch Labs), Evan Shapiro (Media Cartographer), and Ryan Wilson (Sansung Ads) join Variety's Co-Editor-in-Chief Cynthia Littleton for the discussion
HARVEST QUOTE
“I don’t know, it feels weird. I guess maybe I’m a villain to some of them (legacy media), but I feel like a friend. We know how to make something that’s engaging on social media that’s engaging to the young people.”
— History creator Kahlil Greene
A timely quote given the outsized success of Iron Lung and the increasing convergence between the legacy and creator worlds.
It’s easy for us in traditional media to see creators as a threat or as an enemy. But the reality is much different.
If creators have cracked how to consistently earn attention and loyalty from younger audiences, why we wouldn’t want to partner with and learn from them?
Have a great weekend…
I think we'll see the development process change where the idea of world building and in-depth character potential will start being explored at day 1, not after a season or an afterthought when a title becomes popular. Every piece of content should have the potential for a world to be built around it the minute it's greenlit.